Create. Build. Execute.

When we talk about our great innovations and things we’ve reached, we shamelessly admit that we were only able to get there because of the heritage and everything that was created before us to be able to build upon. We refer to this by standing on the shoulders of giants. But what if we are so high up on our giant that we are actually unable to see the ground. And that way limit ourself - even in this entrepreneurship-bubble we are in - to only solve rather small problems, which only appear big in our world.

There has recently been a trademark incident here in Germany: A company tried to trademark the term “hackathon”, got it through and even sent out licence agreement request letters until it got noticed by the community, a huge sh_tstorm broke lose (private Facebook Group) and they pulled it from the registry. And while that is widely considered a success of the community against legal stuff, this actually shows a ignorance of how the system is set up and why it works in the first place.

On a hackathon I have been to recently, one team was pitching an idea for a mobile App that helps you chose your future kids name together with your partner. The technical solution they were proposing was by having each partner rate names in a binary yes-no-fashion and using recommendation systems to find a name both like equally much.

Last week I was writing about how it should be every companies goal to eventually become obsolete as fundamental parts of their DNA in order to make sure they are working on something with high social impact - instead of just financial gain. The ignorant person I am, I totally turned a blind eye on the survivability-feature every system must have; if they don’t they eat themselves up over time. Which is especially true for companies.

The other day I was talking with a few friends about the OpenTechSchool initiative that I am very proud to be part of. One question we were talking about, was the reason behind that whole thing and I painted this picture, the perfect world scenario in which the OpenTechSchool would cease to exist because it simply wouldn’t have any point any more. And if that would be the case I’d be happy for it to cease to exist.

If you charge for your app, service or content before the customer has received it, you have fewer customers as each one of them is harder to acquire. That’s why many services offer to use them for free to a certain extent and only pay if you continue using them, which in reality usually requires limiting the free usage. The other big business model is the free-as-in-advertising model big companies like Google and Facebook are running on, it is free for you but your private data will be used and sold to others to advertise towards you. And especially for running network-structure businesses, where limiting the users always means limiting yourself, this sounds like the only do-able solution. But a new payment model is on the rise promising fix this mistake: the free to pay business model.

In one of my recent articles I made the point that in our field of technology development, we rarely test whether the proposed solution actually adds significantly more value than if you’d replace it with random results. Today I want to discuss this from another angle a bit further. And that is from a product proposition perspective for the person using it, also know as, it “always fails”.

Sure, Berlin is in the startup-hype-phase. And that attract many foreigners. But some voices raise the question of why that is, making the really interesting point on that there have been very little huge success stories with unique and interesting ideas and inventions here for a while. While some argue that is because of a lack of innovation in the blood of germans, I argue it is a very comfortable market size that holds them back. If you think about it makes perfect sense and doesn’t only explain why so many German Companies never expand above the border but also why some countries, like in the north or south of europe, have unproportionally many big successors.